Remote configuration and deployment of sensor drivers for a medical bluetooth sensor gateway

Outpatient nursing services expend a vast amount of time for manual nursing documentation and management of patient basic claims data. Context-driven acquisition of sensor data, documentation of observations and their automated processing can reduce this time, while availability of documented information increases. Usage of wireless sensors is a major element of long-term measurement of medical patient context. Currently a technical experienced nurse, patient or an additional technical service provider is needed on site to configure new sensors and pair them with the patient's or nurse's monitoring device. To ease configuration and maintenance this paper proposes a technique for remote configuration of a sensor gateway and secure automated pairing with Bluetooth sensors. For security reasons this paper presents a generic sensor driver interpreting XML-based protocol specifications to execute the protocol thus avoiding the installation of additional sensor drivers in the operating system for each new sensor. The concept is proven by a theoretical analysis and by an evaluation of the implementation.